Enhancing Characters for Virtual Worlds and Interactive Environments through Human-Like Enhancements

Introduction

Commercial games such as the World of Warcraft by Blizzard Entertainment, and virtual worlds such as Second Life by Linden Lab, share similarities in that they involve the user interacting with the virtual environment through the use of a player-controlled character called an avatar. It is customary, and even more expected that not only do users control one of these avatars, but they have a degree of freedom to customize its appearance to reflect their own imagination, or to blend into the virtual world through the available character choices and customization options. Within the games domain, constraints by developers are often imposed to keep the mythos of the game intact, such as in the World of Warcraft where users have a limited set of custom avatar appearance changes to maintain the games flow in a fantasy setting of orcs, elves and related races. In some virtual worlds such as Second Life, users have a much greater degree of freedom to manipulate their avatar to allow it to appear as almost anything or anyone, through either buying in-world adaptions for their avatars, or creating customizable options themselves through in-world scripting. Though it might be expected that users choose to represent their real-world identity and personality in their avatar, it is customary that many users do not actually do this, and in fact enter the virtual world with virtual genders and supporting behaviors to create a virtual persona. This virtual persona means that it is often not clear how the avatar reflects the user mentally or physically when engaged in avatar-to-avatar conversation.

Avatars in virtual worlds such as Second Life and the World of Warcraft lack automatic facial expressions and bodily gestures unless the user specifically activates one through a keyboard shortcut or from a text prompt as shown in Table 1.